Around the World in 80 Books

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of our World Eco-fiction Series, I present "Around the World in 80 Books: A Guide to Ecological and Climate Themes in Fiction," an article at Medium.com. Themes include harsh survival, advocacy, veneration of the world around us, the slow apocalypse, the haunted, the weird, and the psychological. It's an eclectic and diverse range of stories, set around the world, on every continent. Also, Dragonfly is blending the original spotlight on climate change authors with the newer world fiction series, now that these similar author spotlights are on the same domain.

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A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, Jane Rawson

It is 1997 in San Francisco and Simon and Sarah have been sent on a quest to see America: they must stand at least once in every 25-foot square of the country. Decades later, in an Australian city that has fallen on hard times, Caddy is camped by the Maribyrnong River, living on small change from odd jobs, ersatz vodka and memories. She’s sick of being hot, dirty, broke and alone.

It is 1997 in San Francisco and Simon and Sarah have been sent on a quest to see America: they must stand at least once in every 25-foot square of the country. Decades later, in an Australian city that has fallen on hard times, Caddy is camped by the Maribyrnong River, living on small change from odd jobs, ersatz vodka and memories. She's sick of being hot, dirty, broke and alone.

Caddy's future changes shape when her friend, Ray, stumbles across some well-worn maps, including one of San Francisco, and their lives connect with those of teenagers Simon and Sarah in ways that are unexpected and profound.

A meditation on happiness – where and in what place and with who we can find our centre, a perceptive vision of where our world is headed, and a testament to the power of memory and imagination, this is the best of novels: both highly original and eminently readable.

The book is mostly about imagination and whether the things we imagine are more important than real life. The real-life setting is Melbourne, Australia, in 2030. I have been working in climate policy and journalism for the last several years, so I wrote Melbourne using one of the possible climate change scenarios; it’s much hotter, and either bone dry or occasionally flooded. The gap between haves and have-nots has stretched impossibly wide as government moves money from welfare into constant disaster recovery; power, water and transport infrastructures are patchy and unreliable. The UN have moved in as peacekeepers and bring reports that the rest of the world has become similarly bleak. Parks are overrun with climate refugees and shanty towns. But the words climate change don’t appear anywhere in the book–no one talks about it anymore, it’s just life. There’s also a whole strand of the story that’s entirely imaginary and takes part in San Francisco in 1997. A lot of people who’ve read the novel have said it makes the future threat of climate change more real to them: no longer something that happens to polar bears or Bangladeshis, not something sudden and catastrophic, it’s a process that will make everyone’s lives–even those in comfortable,well-off Australia–harder and more miserable and more precarious. It makes it more believable and tangible.

Quotes

Ursula Le Guin is so important, because she pushed the idea that science fiction, or speculative fiction, can be a space for being really thoughtful, and for really exploring ideas. And also for daring to imagine a version of us that is better—and, in some ways, worse—than our present selves. I think she was unmatched. She was a great novelist, and a great evangelist for the novel. Earthsea is a huge influence, as is The Dispossessed. –Marlon James